Shelby turned to the toddler pinching her leg, a big yellow mixing bowl of potatoes, butter, cheese, salt and pepper between her arm and chest, a portable mixer in the other hand, and a cellphone between her shoulder and her ear. "What?!", she shouted, sounding short to the toddler. "Do-do," little Travis exclaimed, itching to the back of his diaper and spreading a handful of its contents on her leg.
"No, Travis!", she exclaimed, trying to blow a strand of her hair from her face. She put down the mixing bowl and mixer, telling her former husband she'd have to call him back later, disconnecting before he could object. Travis laughed hysterically at the finger painting he was making on his mother's leg, "No," she cried out with a hint of anger in her voice and with a bit of laughter. She bent over a picked up Travis, holding him away from her, his back to her, wriggling and laughing. She took Travis straight to the tub, looking at the VCR clock as she passed through the den. "I'll never make it," she thought to herself, silently cursing her habit of tardiness; silently cursing her ex-husband and her young motherhood.
At the same time, she loved the child she was now stripping off his diaper and sitting in the waterless tub. She loved him with all her being, a love she has never had for anyone or anything, a love that no one or nothing had ever had for her. Except for maybe her cat, Ruby Begonia. Other than Ruby, she never felt loved, not the kind of love she was determined Little Travis would have for her.
She cleaned him off quickly, talking in baby talk and tickling his sides, drying him off and sprinkling baby powder all over him. She set him in a new diaper, singing Swanee River and giving him a thousand kisses, Travis laughing hysterically and trying to get away, but loving every minute of it.
Viola sat on her bed after washing her face and hands. She said her prayers sitting. She was too old to kneel. She said a prayer for her dead friend whom she watched be put into the ground today. It would be the last prayer she'd say for her because, in her opinion, prayers were for the living - not the dead. Viola made the sign of a cross when she was through. She wasn't Catholic, it was just something she picked up when she was young and had always done. She laid on top of the bed, on top of the covers, in the still darkness of the house that sounded alive by the noises it gave up as she closed her eyes and pulled the Afghan sheets over her at the same time. She rubbed her forehead and hovered between sleep and daydreams, but only for a moment. She drifted away to a soft snore, wondering if it would be eternal.
The sound of fiberglass splitting wood opened Viola's eyes from what seems like an angelic sleep. A high piercing scream registered in her mind while the wood was splitting. Still, she wasn't sure if the scream was human or animal. In her younger days, it would have stood her upright. Now, at her late age, she could only lay and give the cobwebs a second to clear, while trying to figure out why her room was filled with searing blue halogen light - the light that reminded her of an alien movie, right before the actor was sucked up into the spacecraft to be probed. Viola pushed herself, realizing the light wasn't fading and her spirit had not left her. The Indian part of her chuckled at the idea of her lost heritage.
She heard a female voice outside and a car door slamming. A few moments later she heard the footsteps that pressed lightly on her front porch, then a loud rapping sound that could have awoken the dead, coming from the beveled glass front door.